Gov’t misses end of year inflation target

The economy ended the year with an inflation rate of 8.8 percent - slightly higher than what government set out to achieve for last year.

This is about 0.3 percentage points higher than government’s target of 8.5 percent.

The December figure however represents a marginal dip compared to the 9.3 recorded for November.

It means that even though price levels of goods and services generally went up in December the rate of increase was marginal compared to the month of November.

Acting Government Statistician, Philomena Nyarko explains to Joy Business what might have accounted for this drop.

“We think that it is the stability in the exchange rate, we didn’t see any changes in petroleum prices and utility prices; so usually those are the things that really account for the change because it reflects in transportation and so on and so forth.”

On regional basis, Greater Accra recorded the highest inflation figure of 11.2 percent.